The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

It's a well known fact among industry types that gamers are now getting older and older by the year. As in, new players are still starting young, but veteran players aren't giving up gaming either as they age. It's becoming more of a legitimate past time among adults, and few are ashamed to admit they still play video games at 25, 30, 40 or more. We're finally starting to eliminate the "just for kids" stereotype, and that's great for the industry.

But there's one obstacle that prevents many adults from enjoying games the way their children do. Time.

When you're a kid, from elementary school through college, you tend to have a fair amount of a free time. Summers are almost completely vacant until you get a job when you're older. Jr. High and High Schools end at 3PM and homework takes far from all night. College classes may be tough, but 16 credit hours a week also leaves a lot of gaps. Even filling in extracurricular activities like sports and music and dates, there's still plenty of time for video games.

Not so with the grown-ups.

A full-time job, summer included, severely constricts free time. After work, add in a wife or husband, and that's another layer of responsibility. And once kids come along? Forget about it. You'll be lucky if you can squeeze out an hour of gameplay between the time you put them to bed, and when you fall asleep involuntarily from exhaustion.

So, what does this means for the types of games adults play?

It leaves a lot of unfinished titles lying around to be sure. Trying to get through a single player campaign that's 15 or 20 or 40 hours can take weeks or months, if it's even completed at all, and it often isn't. It's a far cry from a movie or TV show; the former can be consumed completely in two hours, the latter takes up a very specific 30 to 60 minute time slot each week.

But video games are much, much more of a commitment, and can be much harder to consume for those with little free time, who are almost always adults.

There are intermediate steps of course. Not every game is a 10-30 hour campaign after all. You can sit down and play a few matches of Halo or Call of Duty in an hour. Maybe a game or two of League of Legends or Starcraft.

You can log into an MMO and grind out a few quests and maybe level up once or find a cool new item. Games like that are a marathon, not a race, and one you can keep checking into indefinitely.

But I've also heard complaints about either format. COD and Halo and LoL can be too intense when played against 14 year olds with foul mouths and reflexes that far outmatch anything your arthritic fingers could hope to achieve. MMOs can be equally discouraging when you figure out that to truly achieve anything significant in the game, you must invest far more hours than you have available to you, and on a limited schedule, you'll never be able to reach the highest levels of play or attend every raid you want.

What then am I proposing?

In effect, an entirely new class of games, inspired by the success of this year's The Walking Dead.

The Walking Dead was a great game because of its heavy focus on story, but also because of its desirable format. It's about 10 hours long in total, but each chapter was released in two hour chunks. And the entire game only cost $25, less than half of what a traditional $60 title would go for.

This is the kind of thing I'd like to see more of, and it would be great for busy adults with limited time who still would like to be able to finish a storyline in a video game, or at least not have it take six months to complete.

What I'm talking about would be 5-8 hour long games that heavily focus on story. Not to say they all need to be point and click titles like The Walking Dead, but I think we need to get away from this idea that EVERY game needs to be massive and sprawling. While games like Skyrim or Grand Theft Auto are great, you can tell a story over a shorter stretch of time, in a much smaller environment if need be.

I am in no way calling for existing games to be shorter. I've loved spending 20 hours on campaigns from Deus Ex to Assassin's Creed to Borderlands, and I wouldn't change that for the world. I'm well aware that sometimes, based on the story that's attempting to be told, even a ten hour campaign can feel short. This also isn't to say that adults with jobs, spouses and kids cannot enjoy more traditional, lengthy games, as obviously many currently do.

All I'm asking is that publishers might consider breaking out of the box a little bit with shorter, cheaper games the way we saw with The Walking Dead to give gamers more options. A five hour game wouldn't be worth $60 to be sure, and it would be gouging to price it as such, but for $20? If it was a well-told, fun to play story, I'd certainly think that was worth it.

Some of this is also inspired by something David Cage, creator of Heavy Rain, said at DICE this week.

"We need to decide that violence and platforms are not the only way. Now, if the character doesn't hold a gun, designers don't even know what to do."

Not to say that violent games are bad and shouldn't be made (and I don't think he's one to talk as Heavy Rain had some horrifyingly violent moments), but I think that shorter, story focused games would at least allow for the opportunity for experimentation. Perhaps a few of these stories could focus on something other than killing things as a main gameplay device. Of course there could be both violent and non-violent titles, but I think these micro-games would be a good place for developers to push themselves to go beyond the "usual" video game topics. The way the industry is now, it's like if 95% of the movies released were action flicks. We need to move those numbers.

Of course, I can't just snap my fingers and make this happen. Most big publishers are married to the $60 model, and for good reason, it works. And as for smaller games that do in fact cost $10-$30? There are some great independent titles in that category to be sure, but Super Meat Boy and Minecraft aren't what I'm talking about either.

I'm hoping that people realize that the success of The Walking Dead this year wasn't just about the content of the game, but it also had something to do with the format and price. Games need to expand their definition of what's possible in the medium, and if they do, adults might be able to find the time to play even more titles.